


Heatstroke

by SawyerAik



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Pining, Romance, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-07 19:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8814193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SawyerAik/pseuds/SawyerAik
Summary: A stream of thought.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Солнечный удар](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/246907) by DNIWE.. 



> me thinking about Otabek: but five years, man! fiVE FREAKING YEARS
> 
> DNIWE. wrote a thing and I've translated it, as it goes.  
> Hope you enjoooy~

The jokes about the grim and rainy St. Petersburg turned out to be outrageous lies. While his mom was ironing his clothes and Otabek was trying to fit every little important thing into his travel backpack, his uncle had been reading "Just St. Petersburg things" on one of his programmer forums and laughing. He had even fit three umbrellas into Otabek's backpack. Apparently, he was going to need them.

But the city turned to be out way nicer than he had imagined on his train ride. A calm cloudless sky and nearly no wind – and the suffocating heat made the St. Petersburg summer wholly different from Almaty. Otabek picked up the habit of always holding onto a bottle of chilled water, his thoughts tangled and sluggish under the burning sun. The thin baseball cap was of no help.

Therefore everything was the weather's fault. Definitely. His persistent anxiety that had gotten him downgraded into the novice group. His sleepless nights in the dark of his dorm room, thinking about home and the seaside trip he was promised after the camp. And his inability to forget the piercing gaze of a strange boy who was considered to be the strongest skater in the novice group. The boy's name was Yura, he had cat-green bright eyes, and Otabek started thinking that he had unwittingly gotten a heatstroke sometime in the last few days.

That would have explained a lot.

* * *

But Otabek turned out to be wrong.

He had been living in Canada for a year and a half now, practicing himself into exhaustion to become the best skater of his club, but the piercing green eyes never left his memory. Yura from the camp was all determination and perseverance, like a soldier, marching forward despite losing his troop. He was inspiring.

Otabek had doubled up on the practices and runs, slept in headphones, listening to the program music on repeat, wasted weekends away on extra stretching and exercises – all of that to meet Yura on the same ice rink again, and feel the soldier's gaze fall on him. Maybe even manage to steal a smile.

At some point he started to recognize his addiction for what it was.

* * *

  
Otabek had gotten his dream

His last year in the junior group he had skated on the same rink as Yura – and was not recognized. Yura had walked by, eyes on his feet, thinking about the program. He'd look anywhere but at the people on the sidelines when he skated. Even Yakov was only graced with a frown when the results have been announced.

Yuri Plisetsky had come in first.

Otabek was forth. He had a strong program with jump combinations many of juniors were incapable of. He was predicted to win, but he had simply lost his balance at the most crucial moment and fell. He was pitied, told that it had been a coincidence and that he had everything ahead of him. But Otabek knew that it was no one but him who was responsible for his own failure.

Him, and the green eyes he couldn't stop thinking about, even during the program. How humiliating.

* * *

He had long since admitted that one hot summer in St. Petersburg had brought him not only his first addiction but first love. It was not easy to reconcile with. It was wrong, it went against all the preconceived notions that the society had installed in him since birth. But is was love. The only thought to cheer him up was understanding that first love had tendency to fade away sooner or later.

* * *

When Otabek stood on the podium next to the Viktor Nikiforov himself, his chest glinting with the bronze medal, he could only think about Yura watching the awards ceremony along with everybody else. Maybe he was only thinking about Nikiforov's victory, maybe he had only learned Otabek's full name today and hadn't even bothered to remember it, it didn't matter.

The thought of Yura watching the moment of his triumph unfold made Otabek's heart beat harder and his body run warmer.

That day Otabek made a promise to himself – to share the pedestal with Yura one day, no matter what it would take.

* * *

Yura smiled at him.

Yura gripped his jacket tight when the motorcycle veered into sharp turns, and laughed.

Yura watched him with the same gaze that had haunted Otabek for five whole years, but this time the soldier within Yura was happy. He had come home at last.

Otabek thought he was dreaming, or that his addiction had sprung out of his control and flooded his mind with imaginary smiles and fleeting glances, making him pinch with backside of his hand again and again. But Yura didn't disappear. He squinted, and gesticulated wildly, and he talked and talked and talked. As if he was trying to tell Otabek everything about his life over the five years that had passed since they last saw each other.

In the end of the day, lying on the bed in his hotel room, Otabek thought that this was the first time in his life he had felt truly happy. It was unfamiliar, but ever so pleasant.

* * *

The first time Otabek held Yura's hand he felt his fingers tremble. It was like crossing a border into unfamiliar territory, and the eternal punishment that awaited him for doing so was absolutely worth it.

Yura threaded their fingers gingerly, turning his face away. Otabek would have given anything to see he eyes, his expression – but Yura was looking at his feet and the tips of his ears were on fire.

Otabek's entire world had turned upside down, it seemed, and all of a sudden breathing came easier to him.

* * *

The first time Otabek gave Yura a tentative kiss on his seventeenth birthday, he thought that his addiction had disappeared. It was replaced by a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that had coursed through Otabek's head in the few seconds Yura had stood in front of him, unmoving.

Then his hands were gripping Otabek's jacket and he was answering the kiss, shy and unskilled but desperately determined, and Otabek regretted not seeing Yura's eyes at that moment.

He wanted to see the look in the eyes of a soldier who had finally known love.

* * *

The addiction was not gone, not really.

It stayed within Otabek, clinging to him with claws and taking roots in his veins, but it was easier to quell its demands now.

He could only manage to tame it a year later, when Yura had crossed the threshold of Otabek's apartment, suitcases in his hands.

The memories of that hot summer came back like a flood, memories of constant training and bulk packs of bottled water under his bed, the memory of a small Yura fixing his gaze on him for the first time, and turning away.

* * *

The grown Yura looks at him all the time and smiles happily, and Otabek's head feels dizzy, like a heatstroke.


End file.
